A communication network may include network elements that route packets through the network. Some network elements may include a distributed architecture, wherein packet processing may be distributed among several subsystems of the network element (e.g., line cards). Thus, network elements may be modular and may include various sub-systems and/or sub-elements, which may include a shelf, a slot, a port, a channel and/or various combinations thereof.
After powering on a network element, various sub-systems and/or sub-elements of the network element may be initialized. During initialization, provisioning instructions may be provided to each of the sub-systems and/or sub-elements to control how the sub-systems and/or sub-elements perform various functions (e.g., traffic shaping, quality-of-service control) of the network element. For network elements containing a large amount of sub-systems and/or sub-elements, the amount of provisioning data transferred during an initialization may be very large. Accordingly, the initialization of network elements may take a significant amount of time.